Society

Extremely interesting article. Based on a paper that uses data to develop a model by which the authors analyzed medieval cities and came to the conclusion that medieval cities were strikingly similar to modern cities in how they presented themselves in the model. This, to them, suggested that life in these cities might have been similar to what we experience today in modern cities (in terms of social mixing and mobility).

Uganda

AJ throws some shade at the media about their obsession with the Ugandan refugee policy story. The story also covers why this narrative is beneficial to Uganda and EU countries that want to stop the influx of refugees.

United States

interview with a guy who wrote a book on tea party reactionary politics and how America came to the state that it is in today. He says that the surge of voters that you saw who ended up voting for trump were always there. There is also some truth to the urgency of his call to progressive to embrace the fact that the voice of “resistance”, so to speak, needs to be couched in identity politics. It needs to be about race. It needs to be about sexual orientation. Maybe he’s right.

There’s been a lot written on the number of people in United States prisons based on minor drug charges. Apparently, all of that data comes from federal prison, which hold a small percentage of people imprisoned in the country. Most criminals in the system are there for violent crimes, such as murder, but there isn’t enough being done to reintegrate them into society. They’re just locked away to rot.

Math

Any social science kid knows about Game Theory and the Nash Equilibrium. The basic idea is that given a game, and a certain number of players, playing the game repeatedly (the N value will change depending on the situation), will result in a stable equilibrium, which everybody will be equally satisfied with. It’s a way of achieving societal compromise. It’s also apparently quite the pipe dream. Researchers picked some games that involved about a 100 people and apparently the time required to reach Nash Equilibrium in them would be a time period that would be greater than the life of the universe. That’s not helpful. Fortunately, there’s more than one way to skin this cat. We have something called a “correlated equilibrium” which are equilibrium which aren’t exactly the Nash Equilibrium, but which serve to stabilize the game at an equilibrium point.

“Nash’s equilibrium concept, which earned him a Nobel Prize in economics in 1994, offers a unified framework for understanding strategic behavior not only in economics but also in psychology, evolutionary biology and a host of other fields. Its influence on economic theory “is comparable to that of the discovery of the DNA double helix in the biological sciences,” wroteRoger Myerson of the University of Chicago, another economics Nobelist.”

Philosophy

Philosopher Edward Feser on the incorporeal nature of Angels in the continuum of life, as imagined by Aquinas.

“The problem facing the Cartesian is rather how to explain mind-body interaction in a way that doesn’t reduce it to something comparable to demonic possession. A fallen angel moves a bit of matter around in something like the way a poltergeist is popularly thought to move material things around. A Cartesian res cogitans controlling a res extensa is essentially like a demon’s control of one of the Gadarene swine – the manipulation of something utterly extrinsic to the manipulator, to which it is only contingently related.”

Alt-Right/ Neo-Nazi

Cop is being investigated for having a shirt on with white supremacist symbology on it. The sun cross is an alternate version of the Celtic cross. It’s also part of the logo for stormfront. I can’t figure out where it’s from. It would be interesting to sort of track how this was adapted in this manner. In certain contexts, it might be benign. Probably not in this one though.